Forty years have passed, but Alfreda Slominski remembers the Buffalo School Board meeting of March 26, 1964, as if it occurred yesterday.

"It wasn't held in our regular room," recalls Slominski, who was then a board member. "They had to move it to the Common Council chambers because of all the people. Standing room only. Cameras galore."

The meeting remains equally clear in Viola Hill's mind. "There was quite a stir," she says simply. And William Fairlie can still picture it, too. "It was a contentious atmosphere," he says. "A pressure cooker, to be honest."

Buffalonians under the age of 50 have no memories of the bitter dispute over Woodlawn Junior High School, but many of their elders remember it vividly. The Woodlawn controversy, more than any other event, brought the civil-rights revolution to Buffalo. It struck home with an impact that could never be matched by televised confrontations and protests in distant Mississippi and Alabama.

The core issue was simple. Construction of Woodlawn would be completed by the fall of 1964. Most whites wanted the new school to teach students from its immediate neighborhood, which was almost totally black. Most Negroes, as they were then called, preferred an integrated school that mirrored the racial composition of Buffalo's entire public-school system -- two-thirds white, one-third black.

And there was a bigger, more complicated question, too. Would Buffalo's leaders -- an all-white club -- eventually admit blacks and other minorities to equal membership? Woodlawn would be an early test.

"In those days, there wasn't much difference between Buffalo and Mississippi," says Frank Mesiah, then a teacher, now the president of the local chapter of the NAACP. "Here, they might smile at you, but they'd still treat you the same way as in the South. And the result of that treatment was the same as in Mississippi or Georgia or Alabama."

The federal government agreed. A January 1964 report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission had accused Buffalo of "extensive school segregation" -- indeed, the worst case of racial separation in all of New York state.

But the report's author saw a chance to reverse the trend. "The opportunity to set up new junior high school districts," said George Alexander, "gives the Board of Education a dramatic opportunity to change the racial pattern of schooling for three grades." The first of those new junior highs would be Woodlawn.

Buffalo School Board meetings typically drew a few stragglers, perhaps a couple of dozen people on a good day. But the public's attention was riveted on the March 26 session that would decide the new school's boundaries. More than 300 people squeezed onto semicircular wooden benches in the Common Council chambers in City Hall. Others crowded to the rear, twisting to see around the 12 stone pillars that defined the back aisle.

Seated at desks below the audience were Superintendent Joseph Manch and the seven board members -- three of whom created an explosive mixture of powerful personalities:

Slominski had emerged as a tough and sometimes abrasive advocate of the neighborhood-school concept. "I had a lot to say in those days," she says now. "I was controversial."

The well-spoken, yet doctrinaire Carmelo Parlato had drawn up a plan to make Woodlawn's student body 98 percent black. "He was a very intelligent man, but he took extreme positions," says Arnold Gardner, a colleague on the board in later years. "He was not one who looked for a moderate, compromising line."

Lydia Wright, a pediatrician who was the board's only black member, had been conciliatory early in her term, but now was showing her frustration. "You're committed to segregation and should be kicked off the board," she had snapped at Parlato in February. Segregated schools, to her mind, would "communicate inferiority" to black students. She wanted Woodlawn to be 62 percent white.

Ten elementary schools -- five dominated by white children and five by blacks -- were located within a mile and a half of Woodlawn. It was the board's job to decide which of these students would move on to the new junior high and which would go elsewhere.

Caught in the middle was Manch, the system's longtime superintendent. He initially had come down on the side of integration, but was under intense pressure to switch. Parents of students at the five white elementary schools had submitted petitions with 12,811 signatures opposing their inclusion in the Woodlawn zone.

William Fairlie, the 32-year-old principal of P.S. 41, watched intently from one of the seats above. No one in the crowd knew that his stake in the board's decision was as big as anyone's. Manch had already sounded him out privately about being Woodlawn's principal.

"As far as anyone knew, I was just a bystander," he recalls from his home in Florida. "But I remember it seemed painful for some of the board members as they started to debate all the various plans, and when they tried to justify their votes."

What kind of a school would he be running in the fall? Fairlie -- and everyone else in the city -- waited to see.

Ethnicity has always been considered a defining characteristic in Buffalo.

That's because local immigration occurred in distinct waves. New England Yankees came first to the city, then Germans, then Irish, Poles and Italians. The first two assimilated over time, but the others settled in enclaves that persist in weakened form to this day -- Irish in South Buffalo, Poles on the East Side, Italians in North Buffalo.

These groups, naturally enough, competed with each other politically and economically. But they still shared one trait in common: They were white.

Buffalo's black population was insignificant right up to World War II, equaling just 3 percent of the city's residents in 1940. The federal census counted 17,700 Negroes that year, almost all of them living in a compact area east of downtown, bounded by Main, Virginia and Smith streets.

But their numbers soon began to swell. Southern blacks streamed to Buffalo, attracted by the prospect of work in defense plants. It was difficult for these newcomers to find homes in a virtually all-white city, so the federal government stepped in with plans for a new all-black housing development, targeting a site in South Buffalo in August 1941.

White residents were outraged by this proposed invasion of their neighborhood. They defiantly organized a series of public protests and collected 10,000 signatures on petitions. "It was a big, big thing," says Neil Kraus, a Valparaiso University professor who authored a 2000 book about race relations in Buffalo. "The opposition was just monumental -- not just in South Buffalo, but all over the place."

Federal officials backed away from their original choice, settling on a new site in the Lovejoy area. The results were the same. The only acceptable alternative, it turned out, was to tack 300 new units onto Willert Park, an existing housing project in the black part of the city. "It was clear," says Kraus, "that no whites wanted blacks as neighbors."

That point was reinforced during the 1950s, when more than 80,000 whites fled Buffalo for monochromatic suburbia.

Covenants worked out by local real-estate agencies kept blacks out of suburban homes, as did the Federal Housing Administration's refusal to loan money to black applicants. "If a neighborhood is to retain stability," the FHA's underwriting manual advised, "it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes."

Suburbanites weren't above taking matters into their own hands if all else failed. A delegation of homeowners protested to the Tonawanda Town Board in 1960 when a black family arrived in their area. "Our property goes down, you know, if they move in," one woman told the board. "And when one moves in, there will be more to follow."

No such prejudice existed in Buffalo's school system, bragged its superintendent. "Any thought of segregation is one thing I won't stand for," Joseph Manch said. A black leader contended that Buffalo was violating the spirit of the famous 1954 Supreme Court integration ruling, Brown vs. Board of Education, but Manch vehemently disagreed. "The court was concerned with schools in the South," he replied. "They were not concerned with schools in Buffalo. We just don't operate that way."

But Buffalo, in reality, was doing its best to maintain segregation. The school board altered boundaries in 1954 to guarantee that East High School would be black and Hutchinson Central Technical High School white. And it employed sly tactics that were less obvious, such as shifting Polish-language classes to schools outside of Polish neighborhoods, then allowing white East Side children to transfer to attend those classes.

"Everything was designed to allow white students to leave schools that were becoming black," says Kraus. "You know, so-and-so wants to learn Polish, so we'll have to let him leave, that kind of thing."

But these moves simply delayed the inevitable; they couldn't work forever. Whites were evacuating Buffalo in heavy numbers, while blacks were being prevented from living anywhere but the city. The result was a rapid increase in the black share of Buffalo's population -- 13 percent in 1960, destined to be 20 percent by 1970 -- and an equally swift growth in political clout.

It would only be a matter of time before there was a showdown.

Joe Manch was a man of many skills. He was a dedicated, successful educator -- an English teacher at South Park High School who rose to become the leader of the state's second-largest school system. He also was a published poet and an accomplished photographer whose prints had been displayed at galleries.

But he demonstrated no exceptional talent for tightrope walking.

"I thought Joe was a good man," says Arnold Gardner, a senior partner at the law firm of Kavinoky Cook LLP who served seven years on the school board. "The issue of the day, of course, was desegregation of schools, and Buffalo's were certainly segregated. Joe tried to move people along. He tried very hard, but he was also a realistic man. If he couldn't attain all he sought to accomplish, at least he sought to make progress."

The superintendent tried to nudge the board toward integration during the early 1960s, with little noticeable success. But Woodlawn Junior High presented a special opportunity to link blacks from the east side of Main Street with whites from the west. Here was an entirely new school without a defined service area -- a blank slate on which to draw any boundaries the board saw fit.

"The zone will cross Main Street if I have anything to say about it," Manch insisted at first. He proposed what he thought would be an appealing compromise, establishing Woodlawn as 43 percent white, 57 percent black.

Manch's half-a-loaf philosophy was destined to make enemies on both sides of the controversy. "All those things the school board was doing, he knew they were going on," scoffs the NAACP's Frank Mesiah today. Alfreda Slominski is equally cutting: "I always thought that Joe Manch was a good photographer. Period."

The board's white majority, led by Parlato, would brook no talk of compromise. It sought to include only the five predominantly black schools within Woodlawn's zone.

If a racially balanced proposal were adopted instead, Slominski argued during the March 26 meeting, black children living within a few blocks of Woodlawn might have to be bused elsewhere, making them victims of discrimination. "This I could never do," she said.

Lydia Wright was indignant. "What I seek to promote is the best and broadest education for all children," she declared. "In particular, I believe in integration in public schools, not as an end in itself, but as a significant facet of education. I naturally vote no."

She was the only one. The board approved the Parlato plan, 6-1.

Manch backpedaled, all thoughts of compromise forgotten. "It is not feasible -- from the point of view of sound education and administration -- to draw the district lines for Woodlawn in such a way as to achieve a racial balance that would be meaningful or stable," he said as the meeting broke up.

Black leaders and white liberals left the Common Council chambers in discouragement, remembers Viola Hill, whose youngest child attended a city school at the time. "They put that brand new, beautiful school up there," she says. "But the white parents put up a great protest. And in the final analysis, I guess they won out."

It would not prove to be an absolute victory, however.

U.S. District Court Judge John Curtin would rule 12 years later that the city's public schools must be racially integrated. His decision would cite the Woodlawn vote as a prime example of the Buffalo School Board's "blatant segregative intent with clear segregative results."

The lawyer for the plaintiffs in that landmark case, Richard Griffin, uses less elegant language when recalling Woodlawn's importance in proving his assertion that the schools had been deliberately segregated.

"It was," he says, "one of the biggies."

The building on Masten Avenue still stands, now called Buffalo Traditional School, not Woodlawn Junior High. Its generally clean appearance is marred only by isolated bits of graffiti, yet age is taking a toll. Some of the metal is starting to rust, the paint beginning to peel.

It's a far cry from September 1964, when 1,350 students arrived for classes. Woodlawn was a showplace back then, the newest school in the Buffalo system, the very first to have such innovations as closed-circuit television.

William Fairlie, conscious of being the young, white principal of a nearly all-black school, sought to build connections with parents and neighborhood leaders through a series of open houses and special events. Woodlawn's audio-visual coordinator, Frank Mesiah, was a "big asset" in that effort, Fairlie says today, but it wasn't totally successful.

"There was an acceptance, yet not a comfortable one," the former principal recalls. "The black community felt there had been a great opportunity to integrate the school, but the board went another way. Status quo, that's what it was."

Not everyone was willing to acquiesce. Six black parents filed a formal appeal with the state's education commissioner, James Allen, the same week that Woodlawn opened. They charged that the school board had "deliberately continued de facto segregation by its zoning" of the new school, and they asked Allen to remedy the situation.

So began a dozen years of proposals, counterproposals, local meetings, state hearings, and eventually, a trial in federal court.

A Courier-Express reporter described one of the early hearings, which Allen conducted in Albany in December 1964. Joan Franklon, an NAACP lawyer, charged that the Buffalo School Board was doing everything it could to maintain a segregated system. That prompted the board's attorney, Elmer Stengel, to suggest that Allen should travel to Buffalo to show local officials how to produce an acceptable integration plan.

"Why hasn't the board moved on its own?" Allen shot back. "It doesn't have to confer with me. Others have moved."

Stengel, according to the reporter, simply shrugged.

That remained the official local response for years to come. A study in the early 1970s, more than half a decade after Woodlawn, found that most Buffalo schools were still racially imbalanced. Fifty-five of the city's 77 elementary schools, for example, were at least 80 percent white or 80 percent black.

But judicial attitudes were stiffening against segregation. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1971 that school systems could adopt integration plans that bused students outside of their neighborhoods, something that Buffalo had steadfastly refused to do. White students could be sent to historically black schools; blacks could be bused to previously all-white schools.

The court's decision dialed up the pressure on the Buffalo School Board, which now had to contend not only with pesky state officials, but also with the specter of federal legal action. The board resumed its debate in March 1972, yet again did nothing. Carmelo Parlato sent word to Albany that integration would take time. "We could come up with a plan in 40 years," he cracked.

The inevitable lawsuit was filed three months later, with Mesiah among the plaintiffs. The case was tried in 1974, and Judge Curtin announced his decision in April 1976. The school board, he found, was guilty of "creating, maintaining, permitting, condoning and perpetuating racially segregated public schools." He included the mayor, the Common Council and state officials in his condemnation.

Curtin, in essence, became the overseer of Buffalo's school system, a role he would play for the next 19 years. He worked closely with Manch's successor as superintendent, Eugene Reville, who made the judge's mandates more palatable by creating several magnet schools -- integrated, of course -- including the acclaimed City Honors School.

Curtin was pleased with the results. "I am distressed by people who make statements nationally that integration doesn't work," he told the New York Times in 1985. "It does work. It's plain wrong to say that it doesn't. It's working in Buffalo."

But not everybody agrees. Alfreda Slominski enjoyed a successful political career after Woodlawn -- winning a seat on the Common Council, running a competitive race for mayor in 1969, then serving 19 years as Erie County's comptroller. But Buffalo slipped rapidly during that same span -- losing 225,000 residents in 40 years -- and Slominski blames the change in school policy for much of the decline.

"I feel that abandoning the whole concept of neighborhood schools destroyed the City of Buffalo," she says today. "What happened afterward? People fled the city in search of better schools."

Others see the school board's vote on Woodlawn Junior High not as something to be applauded, but as a lost opportunity. If the board had seized the chance to begin voluntary integration in 1964, says attorney Richard Griffin, decades of racial controversy might have been avoided.

"But they would have needed to approach it in the right way," says Griffin, a counsel at Kavinoky Cook LLP. "If all they did was Woodlawn, and they didn't address all the other devices (the school board) used at the time, they could have created more problems than they solved. To make things better, they would have needed a comprehensive plan."

Author Mabel Ganson Dodge, who grew up in a Delaware Avenue mansion in the late 19th century, confessed that she and her friends weren't familiar with every corner of Buffalo. The East Side, she wrote, was a complete mystery to them, populated by "hard-faced men unknown to us all." She added: "Our instinctive feeling toward the East Side was one of contempt."

Main Street was the dividing line in Dodge's era, separating genteel society on the west from the ethnic groups to the east. Blacks eventually supplanted white immigrants, but Main's role never changed. It was the barrier in an ethnically divided city a century ago, and it's the barrier in a racially divided city today, when nearly half of all residents are members of minority groups.

Joe Manch's initial comment about Woodlawn -- "The zone will cross Main Street if I have anything to say about it" -- was instantly understood by all Buffalonians. It meant that Manch favored integration. Viola Hill, in fact, still reduces the 1964 dispute to geographical terms. "The people on the West Side," she says, "didn't want to send their kids across Main Street."

The federal census identified 33 Buffalo neighborhoods, officially known as census tracts, in which a majority of the residents as of 2000 were black. All but two of those tracts were east of Main Street; the two exceptions were directly adjacent, with Main forming their eastern borders.

Only a few U.S. cities are segregated to such an extent. "Buffalo is very much like Detroit or Milwaukee in a couple of respects," says John Logan, a Brown University sociologist who is an expert on housing patterns. "The first is that segregation is considerably higher there than in the rest of the country. And the second is that there has been almost no change in the past 20 years."

A 2002 Census Bureau study ranked Buffalo seventh among the nation's most-segregated metropolitan areas. Milwaukee had the dubious distinction of being No. 1, followed by other aging Northern industrial cities: Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Newark and Cincinnati. The first Southern city, New Orleans, didn't appear until 11th place.

Additional indicators illuminate the enormity of the local gap between the races:

The typical white family in the City of Buffalo earned $38,900 in 1999, the latest year for which median incomes have been calculated. That was 66 percent above the typical black family ($23,500) and 111 percent above the Hispanic median ($18,500). "That's really a remarkably large disparity," says Logan.

The city's white children were six times more likely than blacks to go to private schools in 2000, based on Census Bureau data. Nearly one-third of Buffalo's white kids attended private elementary or high schools that year. Only 5 percent of black children did the same.

Buffalo ranked dead last among 60 major metropolitan areas in terms of business diversity, according to a 2001 study by American City Business Journals, Business First's parent company. The study used a variety of statistics to evaluate business opportunities for women, blacks and Hispanics.

"The cost of racism has been gigantic for all of us," says Rich Lee, director of community relations and resource development for the Community Action Organization of Erie County. "You can see it everywhere -- on the faces of kids, in schools, in workplaces. And you know it affects people who don't live here, people who might want to locate or invest here, but are discouraged by our inability to solve the problem."

This imbalance is reflected in Buffalo's inner circle of business and political leaders, an elite group whose characteristics have changed little since the Woodlawn era. It remains a closed society with restricted membership, scant turnover and a strong commitment to the status quo.

Business First has ranked Western New York's 20 most influential people since the early 1990s, and white men have always ruled the list. They occupied all 20 slots as late as 1998 and still held 17 last year, including the top 13. White women filled the remaining three places. Minorities were shut out.

"It's really difficult," says Wendy Sanders, CEO of Jos. A. Sanders & Sons Inc. and president of the Junior League of Buffalo. "Men in Buffalo still dominate the economic and political scene. Men still make the decisions -- particularly middle-aged white guys."

A rare exception is the president of KeyBank Western New York, Marsha Henderson, who also chairs the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, the first woman to do so.

There is no denying Henderson's influence in the community -- she is No. 15 in Business First's latest rankings -- or her optimism that more women and minorities will eventually climb the ladder. "There are lots of reasons to feel that these trends are going to change," she says. "I think Buffalo will see a changing mix of leaders."

But if that happens, it will be in the future. The present composition of the city's business leadership is evident in the faces that Henderson sees when she convenes a meeting of the Partnership's board of directors. Seven-eighths of the members -- 58 of 66 -- are men. More than 90 percent are white.

"The board is not reflective of the general population, nor is it intended to be," she says. "It's reflective of the business community. If you look over the past couple of years, I think you'll see a good rotation of women and minorities through the board."

Political leadership is equally restricted. The two local power positions -- mayor of Buffalo and executive of Erie County -- have been held by white men since they were created. And every congressman ever elected from the county has been a white male, too, a streak that Republican Nancy Naples will try to break Nov. 2. (Louise Slaughter, whose district sweeps into Buffalo, is the first woman to represent the city in Congress, but she lives in suburban Rochester.)

The need for new blood undoubtedly will emerge as an issue in next year's campaign for mayor, especially if incumbent Anthony Masiello runs for a fourth term. At least two potential challengers are waiting in the wings.

One of them, Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, already sounds like an insurgent. "Is there still an old-boy network in Buffalo? You betcha," he says, pledging to reach out to all races and both genders. The danger for Hoyt is that he, the possessor of a politically renowned surname, might be considered a member of that same elite network by discontented voters.

Race makes State Sen. Byron Brown more of an outsider. If elected, Brown would be the city's first black mayor. "There is clearly a lack of respect for diversity in our community," he says, "and a lack of respect for the economic power of diversity."

Public dissatisfaction with Masiello is high, as reflected by a favorability rating of only 8 percent for the current city government, according to a Business First-Goldhaber Research Associates Poll released earlier this month.

But it would be a mistake -- for two reasons -- to write off the current mayor. Local voters, no matter how unhappy they may profess to be, have re-elected 90 percent of incumbents since 2001. And local leaders historically have been able to maintain a tight grip on power once they secure it, as noted by the former executive director of Leadership Buffalo, Susan Warren.

"For whatever reason, it is really, really, really difficult for the power folks in this community to open up to new blood or new ideas," she says. "The people with real power are just holding on."